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Authors: Michael Palin
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is a plaque on the wall marking Hemingway’s presence here, though it was not put up until 1994, thirty-three years after his death.
We’re admitted by a stout old concierge with wispy hair, a floral apron and a tired old dog. She says her parents knew the Hemingways, and produces a photo. Then she indicates a steep corkscrew of a staircase, on which we, like Ernest and Hadley before us, toil up to the third floor.
The Hemingway apartment is once again occupied by an American in his twenties. John, a Bostonian who works for the business consultancy firm Arthur Andersen, is friendly, if a little weary of welcoming devotees. He says that around a dozen people ring the doorbell every week and the Tokyo Broadcasting System has beaten us to it by three days.
He lets us come in and look around the tiny area which, thanks to tongue and groove boarding on the walls and Artex cement work on the ceiling, has absolutely no semblance of period atmosphere. I do get quite excited when he tells me it’s up for sale, though I have to remind myself that it is no more than a room, oblong and quite cramped, with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom.
The only real indication of the presence of Hemingway is in the asking price. One million francs. Or PS100,000, or 150,000 euros or $180,000.
The look of the surrounding neighbourhood which Hemingway brings to life in such scabrous detail in the first chapter of
A Moveable Feast
cannot have changed that much. The buildings have aged a little - they seem to be tipped back at a slant to the street, leaning towards each other at odd angles as if tired of standing upright, but they are the same buildings. Around the corner in rue Descartes there still stands the one-time hotel where a wall-plaque says Verlaine died and in which Hemingway took a garret room to write.
Looking a little closer I can see that there are changes of detail. Where the goats were milked, there are car-parking spaces to let for $150 a month, and the Cafe des Amateurs, which Hemingway lovingly recalled as ‘the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard’, is now a decorous cafe full of students and tourists.
The rue Mouffetard itself is still cobbled and it follows a narrow, sinuous course down the hill from the Place Contrescarpe. This morning it is filled with a food market of such abundance that filming amongst the aromas of roasted almonds, crepes, coffee, fresh-baked bread, cheeses, hams, herbs, and fresh-cooked chickens is exquisite torture. The difference is that the fresh food on the street is no longer cheap and those Hemingway would have called the real Parisians are crowded into the supermarket on the corner.
Turn along by the river to the Place Saint-Michel where Hemingway sat in a cafe and drank Rum St James, ‘smooth as a kitten’s chin’. He recollects finishing a story here, which made him feel ‘empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love’, after which he ordered a dozen oysters and a half-carafe of dry white wine to celebrate.
Today the square is full of an odd mixture of policemen and people in white lab coats chanting and bearing placards. I’m told it’s a mass protest by dentists.
Walking on, I pass L’Escorailles, the brasserie which used to be the famous Michaud’s, in whose toilets Scott Fitzgerald had shown Hemingway his penis, seeking reassurance because Zelda, his wife, had told him it was too small. No plaque on the wall to this effect, I notice.
Content myself with peering in the window as Hemingway and Hadley did the night they saw James Joyce and his family in there, tucking in, all speaking Italian.
Thirsty by now, I fetch up at an intimate little spot on the rue de l’Odeon by the name of the Dix Bar. The intimate peacefulness doesn’t last long as a group of enormous French rugby football supporters, well oiled by jugs of
sangria
, start belting out songs, as the French do at the drop of a hat. This reminds me that next to food, drink, writing and making love, Hemingway
We’re admitted by a stout old concierge with wispy hair, a floral apron and a tired old dog. She says her parents knew the Hemingways, and produces a photo. Then she indicates a steep corkscrew of a staircase, on which we, like Ernest and Hadley before us, toil up to the third floor.
The Hemingway apartment is once again occupied by an American in his twenties. John, a Bostonian who works for the business consultancy firm Arthur Andersen, is friendly, if a little weary of welcoming devotees. He says that around a dozen people ring the doorbell every week and the Tokyo Broadcasting System has beaten us to it by three days.
He lets us come in and look around the tiny area which, thanks to tongue and groove boarding on the walls and Artex cement work on the ceiling, has absolutely no semblance of period atmosphere. I do get quite excited when he tells me it’s up for sale, though I have to remind myself that it is no more than a room, oblong and quite cramped, with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom.
The only real indication of the presence of Hemingway is in the asking price. One million francs. Or PS100,000, or 150,000 euros or $180,000.
The look of the surrounding neighbourhood which Hemingway brings to life in such scabrous detail in the first chapter of
A Moveable Feast
cannot have changed that much. The buildings have aged a little - they seem to be tipped back at a slant to the street, leaning towards each other at odd angles as if tired of standing upright, but they are the same buildings. Around the corner in rue Descartes there still stands the one-time hotel where a wall-plaque says Verlaine died and in which Hemingway took a garret room to write.
Looking a little closer I can see that there are changes of detail. Where the goats were milked, there are car-parking spaces to let for $150 a month, and the Cafe des Amateurs, which Hemingway lovingly recalled as ‘the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard’, is now a decorous cafe full of students and tourists.
The rue Mouffetard itself is still cobbled and it follows a narrow, sinuous course down the hill from the Place Contrescarpe. This morning it is filled with a food market of such abundance that filming amongst the aromas of roasted almonds, crepes, coffee, fresh-baked bread, cheeses, hams, herbs, and fresh-cooked chickens is exquisite torture. The difference is that the fresh food on the street is no longer cheap and those Hemingway would have called the real Parisians are crowded into the supermarket on the corner.
Turn along by the river to the Place Saint-Michel where Hemingway sat in a cafe and drank Rum St James, ‘smooth as a kitten’s chin’. He recollects finishing a story here, which made him feel ‘empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love’, after which he ordered a dozen oysters and a half-carafe of dry white wine to celebrate.
Today the square is full of an odd mixture of policemen and people in white lab coats chanting and bearing placards. I’m told it’s a mass protest by dentists.
Walking on, I pass L’Escorailles, the brasserie which used to be the famous Michaud’s, in whose toilets Scott Fitzgerald had shown Hemingway his penis, seeking reassurance because Zelda, his wife, had told him it was too small. No plaque on the wall to this effect, I notice.
Content myself with peering in the window as Hemingway and Hadley did the night they saw James Joyce and his family in there, tucking in, all speaking Italian.
Thirsty by now, I fetch up at an intimate little spot on the rue de l’Odeon by the name of the Dix Bar. The intimate peacefulness doesn’t last long as a group of enormous French rugby football supporters, well oiled by jugs of
sangria
, start belting out songs, as the French do at the drop of a hat. This reminds me that next to food, drink, writing and making love, Hemingway
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